What Cooking Teaches Us About Mental Health

The art and science of leading a life that is healthy and rich with flavour.

This article was first published on Psychology Today by the same author, which you can access here.

What’s Cooking Got to do with Mental Health?

Cooking is a deliberate process of selecting ingredients, experimenting with combinations, and balancing the flavours to produce a meal that is both nourishing for our bodies and satisfying for our taste buds.

In much the same way, managing our mental health involves selecting various biopsychosocial factors (our mental health ‘ingredients’) and combining them in a holistic strategy (a ‘recipe’) to create experiences that we don’t just have to endure, but get to cherish and savour.

Active Ingredients in Mental Health

‘Active ingredients’ are a scientific concept in mental health, defined as the individual aspects of care that make a difference in outcomes. Just as the ingredients of a meal provide the building blocks for our physical bodies, these active ingredients are the building blocks for our mental health. They cover a range of biopsychosocial factors, such as:

• Biological: Uninterrupted sleep, time spent in nature, and regular exercise.
• Psychological: Emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and a willingness to put in the work.
• Social: Supportive relationships, therapeutic alliances, and a sense of belonging.

Just as no single food guarantees health, no single ‘active ingredient’ is a magic bullet. It is our job—as mindful chefs—to understand the unique qualities of each ingredient and activate their richness by blending them together. It is both an art, requiring creativity and intuition, and a science, requiring measurement and methodology.

A Daily Practice

In both cooking and mental health, we are most successful when we build an appetite for improvement. Every day, regardless of how yesterday went, there is a new meal to make.

We must not dwell on our failures, but instead focus on what we’ve learned and tweak our recipe. Equally, when we get a taste of success, our work is done only for that day.

Each new day presents a new task. In this way, managing our mental health can be better understood as a daily practice of picking our tools up and going again—day after day.

Why Analogies Unlock New Approaches

Analogies enable us to understand one concept in terms of another, making abstract or complex ideas easier to grasp and apply. Mental health is one of those intricate topics with countless moving parts, which can often feel overwhelming or elusive to navigate.

The cooking analogy helps us to understand and manage our mental health by comparing the practice of cooking with the practice of mental health care. We choose ingredients and bring them together in the right proportions by following a recipe, much like following a strategy for our mental health. As the chef, we are responsible for crafting the recipe and applying it effectively, tailoring it to our specific needs at any given moment.

By conceptualizing our approach to mental health through the analogy of cooking, we extend our understanding beyond the range of literal thinking, into the range of figurative, poetic, and colourful thinking. This more imaginative way of thinking helps clarify our understanding, spark curiosity, and unlock new approaches to fulfilling our mental health needs.

With the cooking analogy in mind, the principles of how we approach food—variety, balance, and creativity—can be more easily applied to how we approach our mental health, transforming it from something we passively endure into something we skilfully create.

Like cooking, our mental health practice is not just something we need to do, but something we can enjoy doing, too. By embracing this philosophy, we can find delight in both the process and the outcome—the delicious meal and the process of cooking it, or the peaceful state of mind and the process of nurturing it.

Every Chef Needs a Sharp Set of Knives

A chef with dull knives will struggle to get the most out of their ingredients, just as a person without the right psychological tools will find it difficult to make the best out of life.

The Mindful Self-Care Scale (MSCS) is a clinically validated tool (or ‘knife,’ if you will) that helps people identify areas of strength and weakness in their active ingredients across six domains of self-care:

1. Relaxation (e.g., doing something creative to relax)
2. Physical care (e.g., eating a variety of nutritious foods)
3. Self-compassion (e.g., reminding yourself that challenge is part of being human)
4. Relationships (e.g., spending time with people who are good to you)
5. Structure (e.g., maintaining a balanced schedule)
6. Awareness (e.g., a calm awareness of your feelings)

This serves as a reliable starting point in understanding the key ingredients at our disposal so that, just like a chef, we can turn a meal into a masterpiece.

Crafting Your Recipe for a Healthy Mind

The practice of bringing these ingredients together is like perfecting a recipe: by selecting organic goods, leaving out toxins, and embracing the process of experimentation, we can unleash the full flavours of human flourishing.

The result is a life that is not just good for us, but one that makes us feel fully alive, inspired, and grateful—just like a good meal should.

So chef, are you ready to start cooking?

Written by Dr Manu Sidhu 🩺

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